Americans are fond of revering their flag, dubbed «Old Glory». However, most Americans have never heard of other «flags» common in their history, «false flags» intended to whip up public fervor and plunge the United States into a continuous cycle of warfare.

The use of commercial passenger planes as false flag targets of opportunity for U.S. national security and intelligence planners is nothing new. The U.S. National Archives yielded an explosive formerly classified document some five months before the 9/11 attack in 2001. The document, «Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba» outlined for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a series of false flag attacks, codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS, which would be carried out by the United States on various targets but be blamed on the Fidel Castro government of Cuba. Dated March 13, 1962, the Top Secret NORTHWOODS document was prepared by America’s top covert Special Operations officer, General Edward Lansdale.

Lansdale, who was a key leader of a Central Intelligence Agency plan, OPERATION MONGOOSE, which targeted Castro for, among other things, assassination inside Cuba, was the head of the «Cuba Project» under Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer.

NORTHWOODS extended MONGOOSE targets from Cuba to the United States. NORTHWOODS called for carrying out bogus Cuban terrorist attacks in Miami and other Florida cities, as well as in Washington, DC, that would be blamed on Castro and be used to justify, amid the public outrage over the attacks, a full-scale American military invasion of Cuba. The NORTHWOODS plans called for the sinking of a boatload of Cuban refugees en route from Cuba to U.S. shores, blowing up an American ship in Cuban waters, and more importantly in light of the recent downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, faking a Cuban Air Force attack on a civilian jetliner.

Lansdale and his NORTHWOODS planners concluded that the U.S. invasion of Cuba would receive wide support as a result of an outraged public. The document states: «World opinion and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere».

Similar language has been used in the talking points of the U.S., British, Canadian, and other Western governments to describe the self-government authorities in eastern Ukraine and even the Russian government itself. After an admission by senior U.S. intelligence officials that there is no evidence that ties Russia to the downing of MH-17, Western corporate propaganda media, aided and abetted by neo-conservative longstanding enemies of Russia and President Vladimir Putin, continue to beat the drums for war and blame Moscow for the attack on MH-17.

With the consensus admission by the CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other U.S. intelligence agencies that there is no evidence of Russian involvement in the attack on MH-17 comes the distinct likelihood that MH-17 fell victim to a NORTHWOODS-like false flag operation designed to isolate Russia internationally and defame Putin and Russia’s leaders just after the announcement in Brazil of the establishment of a new international development bank by the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Putin also became an instant hit with Latin American leaders he met at a time when Latin Americans’ view of U.S. President Barack Obama has hit an all-time low. In other words, U.S. Special Operations planners may have decided to dust off and revise NORTHWOODS by changing «Castro» to «Putin» and the right-wing Cuban exiles who were to help carry out false flag attacks to the neo-fascist elements within the Ukrainian Defense and Interior ministries who carry out America’s «dirty work» on the ground in Ukraine.

Referring to the perpetrator of the attack on MH-17, one senior U.S. intelligence official told the Associated Press, «we don’t know a name, we don’t know a rank and we’re not even 100 percent sure of a nationality». In other words, the CIA and the other U.S. agencies, which have Ukraine covered by telecommunications intercepts and photographic and thermal imagery from orbiting satellites cannot rule out the Kiev authorities as the perpetrators of the MH-17 attack.

Obama is advised by those who want to overthrow Putin from power in Moscow with the same burning desire they engaged in destabilization operations to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, Bashar al Assad in Syria, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Hun Sen in Cambodia, Nuri al Maliki in Iraq, and Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. Obama echoed the neo-con propaganda points of his administration’s chief «Responsibility to Protect» interventionist aides, including national security adviser Susan Rice, UN ambassador Samantha Power, and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. These interventionists are even better places to ensure the media runs with White House talking points, regardless of «real» or «false» flag events. Rhodes’s brother David Rhodes is president of CBS News. Rice’s husband, Ian Cameron, has been a producer for ABC News in New York and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news in Toronto. Between Obama’s number one and two National Security Council officials, there are enough White House personal contacts with the corporate media to sell anyone as the perpetrator of the attack on MH-17.

Obama said he is confident that MH-17 was shot down «over territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine» and that Russia «trained and armed [the separatists] with military equipment and weapons, including anti-aircraft weapons.” Obama appears more willing to mimic his White House national security polemicists and propagandists than heeding the intelligence of the CIA, NSA, and other agencies. After blaming Russia for the attack without the supporting intelligence evidence, Obama winged off to the West Coast to collect campaign cash for Democrats for the upcoming November off-year election. White House observers reported that there is no sense of any sort of «national security» crisis within the administration. Such crisis atmospheres are difficult to maintain when those who perpetrated the crisis event are also manufacturing the public’s reactions to it.

Other elements of NORTHWOODS that are relevant today were plans to «start rumors» through the use of clandestine radio stations. Today, with such networks as Fox News, MS-NBC, CNN, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, clandestine news sources are not necessary. Journalists are more than willing to prostitute themselves to delivering the government propaganda lines. There were also plans to land Cuban refugees wearing Cuban military uniforms «over the fence» in Cuba to carry out an attack on the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, sink a U.S. ship near the harbor entrance, and «conduct funerals for mock-victims,» and carry out an attack on a «drone (unmanned) vessel in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago».

Other NORTHWOODS plans were to carry out a «Cuban-based, Castro-supported» attack on a neighboring Caribbean nation, such as the Dominican Republic. On October 6, 1976, CIA-supported Cuban exiles actually carried out such an attack on a civilian jetliner. Cubana Airlines flight 455, a DC-8, was blown out of the sky after two bombs were placed on board the airliner at Seawell Airport in Barbados. All 78 passengers and crew members were killed when the plane exploded over the Caribbean five miles off the Barbados coast. Among the dead were women and children and the entire Cuban fencing team. Nationals of Guyana and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were also killed. The perpetrators were tracked back to a CIA-funded Cuban opposition group based in the Dominican Republic, the same country that was mentioned as a target for false flag attacks by NORTHWOODS.

NORTHWOODS operations against civilian airline traffic is also spelled out in the document. A «properly painted» disguised U.S. Air Force F-96 was to harass civilian aircraft and then be reported by crew and passengers as a Cuban MiG. The key plan against civilian aircraft was to be the shooting down of a chartered civilian airliner «en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama, or Venezuela».

The chartered plane would be carrying «a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest». The flight plan would call for the plane to cross Cuban airspace. The NORTHWOODS document states «an aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to a minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being [sic] transmitting on the international distress frequency a «MAY DAY» message stating he is under attack by MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by the destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to «sell» the incident.

There were also plans to fake a Cuban attack on a U.S. F-105 by «disbursing F-105 parts, parachute, etc. at approximately 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast». The parts would then be «found» by search ships and aircraft.

NORTHWOODS proves the existence of U.S. false flag attacks against civilian aircraft as a part of U.S. military doctrine and CIA «trade craft». Elements of NORTHWOODS have as much relevance as they did with respect to Israel’s shooting down of Boeing 727 Libyan Arab Airlines flight 114 over Sinai in 1973; the CIA’s bombing of Cubana flight 455 in 1976; perpetrators still remaining at-large involved with the hijackings of American Airlines flights 11 and 77, United Airlines flights 175 and 93, and the suspected bombing of American flight 587 from New York to the Dominican Republic; and today with Malaysian Airlines flight 17 and the still-missing flight 370. Attacks on civilian aircraft are so engrained in U.S. and Israeli military doctrine, there is nothing to suggest that the practices have been shelved.

Wayne MADSEN is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. Has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. Lives in Washington, D.C.

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